Well over 20 years ago I heard the Vienna Boys Choir perform on the church parvis of Gharb in Gozo. So when I saw that they were coming back to Malta I quickly got myself a ticket. This time they were to perform at the Manoel Theatre in Valletta. A theatre well suited to them and their music I found.
The performing choir was actually two-fold. There was the Sängerknaben Mozart Choir - the young boys, aged between nine and fourteen, and then there were the grown up “boys”, former choristers who make up the Chorus Viennensis.
While the young choristers have been wearing their iconic white and blue sailor suits since 1924, the members of Chorus Viennensis have definitely outgrown them and moved on to traditional formal suits. What does stay the same though is the discipline of standing in formation on stage, accurate spacing and perfect posture with hands kept still at the sides. When soloists step forward to perform, the rest quickly rearrange themselves to fill gaps, and just as effortlessly allow them to join the ranks again afterwards. It is a joy to watch how smoothly these changes happen. These gifted boys are so well rehearsed and disciplined that I found it a welcome change to see one of the boys quickly scratch his nose or arrange his hair while walking off stage.
The boys in the Mozart choir, one of four touring choirs that make up the 'Sängerknaben' , come from as far away as Australia, Korea, India and Taiwan, from European countries like Albania, Serbia and Ireland, and of course many hail from Austria.
Their Brazilian choirmaster, Luiz de Godoy, who - when he wasn’t accompanying them adroitly on the piano - was conducting them as if he held their voices by invisible strings. Or perhaps that’s too old-fashioned an expression. Maybe I should say it seemed he was commanding and regulating the voices with his remote control hands. Either way, the direction and resulting harmony were exquisite.
The programme was a lovely mixture of music spanning a period of 450 years, including favourites like Schubert’s Ave Maria and Vivaldi’s Gloria as well as folk songs from various countries. Josef Strauss’s polka “On holiday” was given an amusing contemporary touch by new lyrics that contained the delightful line “noch ein Selfie mit der schoenen Elfi” (yet another selfie with beautiful Elfi).
When the concert ended with the' Kaiserwalzer' by Johann Strauss I was just a tiny bit sad that they hadn’t included the Blue Danube waltz in the programme. Silly me! They sang the “Blue Danube waltz” and “Wiener Blut" as encores, finishing the evening literally and metaphorically on an uplifting and satisfying note.
And I left the theatre thinking that as long as the children of this world can sing together in such harmony their future might not look so bad after all.
You can read more about the choir and its history here.
And here is where you can listen to them singing the “Donauwalzer”.